PROPER 28, YEAR A

November 19, 2017

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Warwick, R. I.

 

Matthew 25:14-30

 

As we think about stewardship and pledging, it’s perhaps providential that today’s appointed Gospel should be one of Our Lord’s great stewardship parables. The biblical definition of a steward is a servant entrusted with the management of his master’s wealth and property. The servants or slaves in the Parable of the Talents fit this description perfectly. So, it seems opportune this morning to grapple a bit with what Jesus is teaching us in this story. 

 

Interpretations of this parable have tended to go in one of three directions. First is the economic interpretation, associated with what Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic. By this reading, the parable justifies the accumulation of earthly wealth and the enjoyment of material prosperity as signs of God’s favor. To those who have will more be given …

 

The problem with this type of interpretation is that it presupposes a thoroughly modern understanding of economics, and it fails to recognize how shocking and scandalous this parable would have been to our Lord’s original audience. In our day, we’re apt to admire the first two servants who invest their money and double their return for their good business sense. And we’re apt to scorn the servant who buries his money in the ground just as we scorn people who stuff their life savings away in mattresses. Money loses value over time, and we’ve got to keep it invested just to stay even.

 

But people in the ancient world saw matters very differently. They didn’t understand inflation as we do; and they saw nothing wrong with hiding treasure in the ground. In fact, the rabbis taught that when someone entrusted you with a large sum of money, burying it for safekeeping was the most morally responsible thing to do. Indeed, one who did so bore no liability if the money was lost.

 

Moreover, the ancient world’s operating assumption was that the supply of this world’s goods was finite, limited, and already distributed. So, if you weren’t born rich, the only way you could get rich was by robbing someone else and making them poor. People who became wealthy through business dealings were universally suspected of fraud, deceit, or theft. Financial success was not the badge of respectability that it is today: quite the opposite.

 

So, our Lord’s original audience likely regarded the first two servants, who double their money, as shady and dishonest characters. For the original hearers, the parable’s great scandal would have been that these disreputable servants end up being rewarded, while the honest servant, who’s done the right thing by burying his money safely in the ground, ends up being punished.

 

If the economic interpretation doesn’t work, then we have what we might call the moralizing interpretation. The word “talent” in Greek means both a measure of weight and a denomination of currency, like the British pound. But it totally lacks the English sense of the word “talent,” and so has absolutely nothing to do with the ability to paint, sing, write, play basketball, or do needlepoint. Still, innumerable sermons and devotional commentaries on this parable exhort us to use our God-given gifts, skills, and talents, to the best of our abilities. That may be good advice, but it fails to capture the full import of today’s Gospel.

 

Ultimately, this parable is about neither wealth-management nor personal self-improvement, but the Kingdom of God. We get a glimpse of this when the two servants who’ve doubled their money are invited to “enter into the joy” of their Master, while the servant who buried the money in the ground is cast “into the outer darkness; where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” 

 

And so we come to a third type of interpretation, which might be called allegorical. The Church’s traditional reading of this parable is that the Master is a figure of Christ who entrusts us with everything we have in this life: all our gifts, in every sense of the word. The master’s departure on a long journey away symbolizes Christ’s Ascension into heaven. And the master’s delayed return and demand for an accounting from his servants symbolizes Christ’s Second Coming, when he shall call each of us to account for our stewardship of the gifts he’s given us.

 

More than that, the Parable of the Talents challenged its original hearers, as it challenges us, to imagine a different kind of universe, governed by different economic laws, with a different kind of wealth, denominated in a different kind of currency. In a world governed by finitude and scarcity, there are circumstances in which hoarding treasure makes perfect sense. We’d better guard what we have, or others might take it from us. 

 

But maybe the talents in the parable represent not commodities to be invested or hoarded, but rather gifts to be shared. Our Lord has entrusted great treasures into our care—the Gospel, the Sacraments, the means of grace. He intends us to share these treasures and to spread them abroad liberally. When we do share them—freely, generously, and abundantly—we find that, unlike material wealth and possessions, which diminish the more we give them away, these spiritual gifts keep on multiplying back to us until the day when the Master returns and bids us enter into his joy.

 

To go one step further, the original hearers of Saint Matthew’s Gospel would have understood, just as we understand today, that the two servants who doubled their money were risking everything, while the servant who hid his talent in the ground was playing it safe. Here the parable illustrates the principle that our Lord twice enunciates elsewhere in Saint Matthew’s Gospel: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” 

 

In other words, just as the two enterprising servants laid down everything they had in a game of double-or-nothing, even so, those who’re willing to lay down everything in the Lord’s service, including even their lives, are the ones who gain eternal life. But those who cling to their belongings, their fortunes, and their lives are the ones who end up losing them, like the servant who buried that one talent which is death to hide.

 

To understand this parable, then, we don’t really need to identify what, if anything, the talents represent. They’re not really the point. The parable calls us to a bold generosity of spirit, a self-sacrificial willingness to risk everything, in the assurance that if we do so, then in the end, we shall hear the Lord saying to us: “Well done, good and faithful servant … Enter into the joy of your Master.”